Transportist Posts

• A Friendly Guide to Transport Planning | Human Transit [“Access — where can you get to soon? — is, or should be, the core idea of transportation planning”] — Jarrett Walker
• Fielding Dreams – Hypotheses about Induced Demand and Induced Supply, [“In the planner’s telling, only the hapless traffic engineer, who made the partial equilibrium assumption that demand does not respond to supply, is surprised” by induced demand.]
• On Power and Multi-sided Markets: Internet, Cities, Universities, Hollywood, and Politics [“Power accrues to the middleman. Most power comes from being the middleman in a difficult-to-disintermediate multi-sided market.”]
• 15 Strategies to Solve Global Warming [“as long as we don’t have net zero or net negative carbon emissions, the queue of unabsorbed pollution will continue to lengthen.”]
• Observations of Canberra
• On Politics and Politicians
• Journal of Transport and Land Use: Volume 11

Transport Jobs

•  Level B Research Fellow x 2 at ITLS.  Closing date: 11:30pm, 25 February 2018.

Transport Scholarships

• Forest Coach Line in association with the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies are offering a Scholarship to a PhD student whose research is focused on public transport. Please see website and Research Database for further information.
• The Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies are offering a Scholarship to a PhD student whose research is focused on public transport. Please see website and Research Database for further information.

Transport News

Transit

[It is a requirement to use the phrase ‘off-the-rails’ in commentary about Sydney rail issues]

• Sydney transport planners off the rails with metro plans Sydney’s first metro may be more the triumph of technocratic evangelism and private sector opportunism than a carefully grafted enhancement to a complex system – SMH [Dick Day]
• This is how Sydney’s transport system has gone off the rails – theconversation.com [David Hensher]
• Why Sydney’s transport is doomed to fail its users – ABC
• Construction Costs: Metro Stations – Pedestrian Observations [Alon Levy]

Roads

• Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11.52 Under Congestion Plan – NY Times
• Lawmakers berate transport chief over outdated usage estimates for mega-bridge connecting Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau – SCMP
• NSW truck deaths increase by 86 per cent in 12 months – SMH
• How many motorists are using the widened M4? Government refuses to say – SMH [Honestly, just send an intern and count the damn cars, traffic counts are not a state secret, lame all around]
• Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US – The Verge

AVs

Quote: I just realized that with the advent of self-driving vehicles, we may soon get country songs where your truck leaves you too. [Marko Kloos on Twitter]

• GM introduces a self-driving car without a steering wheel GM’s self-driving team will need federal government approval to test the new car. – CNN
• Self-Driving Cars in a City Like No Other – Autonomous transportation launching to 125,000 residents in Florida– Voyage [press release]
• A User’s Guide to Driverless Cars Companies promise to fill the roads with robo-taxis, delivery vehicles and shuttles that will transform transportation. bloomberg.com
• A key part of many autonomous cars just got a huge price cut – Slashgear
• How Big is the Transportation Opportunity? – Horace Dediu

EVs

• Electric car plans spark showdown Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is facing a partyroom showdown over his support for electric ­vehicles in Australia, amid industry calls for $7000 tax – The Australian

SVs/Taxis/Car Sharing

• Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark – Bloomberg
• Why Can’t Uber Make Money? – Forbes
• Didi Chuxing’s ambitious plans for new energy vehicles – AllTechAsia
•  Report: China’s Didi to buy Brazil’s 99 in $1B deal – TechCrunch
• BMW and Daimler close to merging car-sharing units – Reuters
• Uber CEO hopes to have self-driving cars in service in 18 months – TechCrunch
• Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Said to Plan Sale of 29% of Stake – Bloomberg

HGVs/Freight/Delivery/Retail

• Amazon Go, a high-tech version of a 7-Eleven, will finally open on Monday — with no checkout lines – Recode
• Truck drivers still aren’t paid for all the work they do, leading to fatigue on our roads – Ann Williamson at the Conversation

Intercity Rail

• Second person in less than a week killed by high-speed Brightline train in South Florida – USA Today
• Brightline kills woman during VIP ride – Sun-Sentinal

Land Use

• China’s Hot Housing Market Begins to Cool In Beijing and Shanghai – WSJ
• What Happens When You Ease Parking Requirements for New Housing – Nick Magrino

Science

• Arsonist falcons suggest birds discovered fire before humans did​ – New Scientist

HPVs/Bikes/Pedestrians

• Dockless bike-share leads to quick spike in bike use in Chinese cities – Bikebiz.com
• Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”? – Jordan Fraade

Ferries

• Ferry McFerryface fail leaves Transport Minister Andrew Constance red-faced – SMH

Social Networks

• The Last Days of Reality – Mark Pesce

Linguistics

• Driverless cars might follow the rules of the road, but what about the language of driving? A sociolinguist wonders if they’ll ever be able to interpret the waves, high beams and middle fingers of human drivers. – The Conversation
• Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes – NY Times

Trade

• The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely – The Atlantic 

Research

Books

Now available:

• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. 342 pages, 164 Images (most in color). Published by the Network Design Lab.

Nothing in cities makes sense except in the light of accessibility. Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.

Purchase:

• PDF (Electronic Download)  (on Gumroad)… $8.88
• High Quality Color Trade Paperback (on Blurb)…  $28.88
• Very High Quality Color Hardcover (on Blurb) … $88.88

• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. [3rd Edition] By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.